Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Monday, March 4, 2013

On Friday, we dropped due to a half day. Today, we were assigned into groups of four or five, in order to produce diary entries based off of a timeline of the Scottsboro Trials. Each group wrote three journal entries, out of what I assume to be four total to be finished tomorrow, each from the perspective of a different person or group of people involved in the trials. To provide some background, the Scottsboro Trials were a series of trials in which a group of black men were accused of raping two white women. Even though one of the women confessed to not having been raped, the young men were still tried and some were sentenced to death. These events are also inspiration for the book To Kill a Mockingbird. My group was assigned the jury of the trials, which was significantly impacted due to the removal of African Americans from the board.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Yesterday in history class, we discussed the work of Marcus Garvey, an African American activist who sought equality for blacks worldwide. He was arguably the most radical of the Civil Rights activists of his time, due to his idea that African Americans and whites could never coexist peacefully and therefore must be separated. He believed that in order to achieve this separation, African Americans should migrate "back" to Africa, which many of them had been removed from for generations. Garvey was also jailed and later deported back to his homeland, Jamaica, on the grounds of being an undesirable alien due to his alleged mail fraud. We studied his works by filling out a worksheet on him and how others reacted to his ideas in groups. After that, we briefly discussed the topics that we had just covered.
Today, we read three brief poems about life in the South and how life elsewhere would be a better alternative, though not necessarily good. We were then asked to think about how these poems described life in the South vs. life in the North. After that, we listened to some music written in Harlem during the Harlem renaissance and discussed what they meant and the overall tones of the songs. Finally, we looked at some pictures from the Harlem renaissance era, which showed how African Americans were able to have fun and much more freedom in the North than in the South.

The Friday before vacation, we finished up our RSA Animate projects by recording them on the computer. After vacation, we paired up together in order to discuss the views of DuBois and Washington, two African American Civil Rights activists, DuBois being more radical and aggressive, and Washington playing to the wishes of the white man. Washington believed equality would come by succumbing to white pressure and starting out at the bottom to work your way up in society. DuBois believed that equality would only come if you seized it. Essentially, Washington believed in power through wealth and DuBois believed in the more immediate power through politics. After we were done reading a document about one of the two and answering questions, we switched partners in order to share our information. We then summed up the class by summarizing what each of the activists believed and which was the best solution.